As the play opens there is a veneer of fierce determinism in the demeanor of Elesin:
“Praise singer: Elesin o! Elesin Oba! Howu! What tryst is this the cockerel goes to keep with such haste that he must leave his tail behind?
Elesin: (Slows down a bit, laughing) A tryst where the cockerel needs no adornment” (7, emphasis mine).
From these statements, it will seem that Elesin means to keep his head straight on the communal task ahead of him, but beneath this façade of determination one can read a tactful ploy at playing evasion. Elesin is aware of the solemn nature of his task that evening. He knows that to carry the collective guilt of the community by way of forfeiting his own life is not a time for adorning luxurious clothing, frolicking with women, and deflowering a nubile belle, and such other social pastimes. It is a difficult duty requiring committed and austere living—meditation, solitude, spiritual cleansing, and a phenomenal will, fired by the praise singer’s music and praise incantations, and doubly aided by the ethereal or celestial presence of the Yoruba pantheons. Elesin is in a hurry therefore to meet the last badge of people leaving the market because their absence will create a perfect setting for his ritual, which he does not mean to carry out. If he really does mean to execute his very onerous communal duties, he would naturally choose a tranquil moment devoid of the distractions of human presence. As Wole Ogundele has noted, ‘Elesin overdramatizes his eagerness to go in order to hide his reluctance—even from himself’ (54). Even the praise singer who is quite central to this task, x Elesin will abandon because in the true sense of the word, he will ultimately not need him. The world Elesin ‘knows is good’ (DKH 17); it is an epicurean lifestyle with luxurious wines, clothes, women, and the best of the world. It is not a world he wants to leave. At the market, he realizes the women think him ‘a man of honour’ and thus expect him to fulfill his duties. The outcome of this communal expectation draws Elesin’s ire: ‘stop enough of that’ (DKH 17). From now on, he must devise and deploy manipulative tactics to evade his ultimate task—first new clothes, then a new bride, and then finally the ‘colonial factor’— Mr. Pilkings.
Indeed, Elesin confesses his own unwillingness to his new bride—‘I confess to you, my daughter, my weakness came not merely from the abomination from the white man who came violently into my fading presence, there was also a weight of longing on my earth-held feet’ (DKH 71, Emphasis mine). Therefore, Elesin lacks the will to carry his people’s future through that ‘numinous zone’ that is the abyss of transition. It is significant to note, especially in the context of Soyinka’s theorization of the Yoruba worldview as reflected in tragic drama that, ‘Elesin’s intended sacrifice is not meant to suggest the obliteration of an individual soul, but rather is an implicit confirmation of an order in which the self exist with all of its integrity but only as one small part of a larger whole’ (Gates Jr. 70). Elesin is only an infinitesimal part of a large whole made up of the physical Oyo kingdom, the world of the ancestors of Yoruba people, and that of their unborn children. Elesin’s grave sin to his community, then, is the way in which he compromises its future for personal gratifications—drinks, clothes, women, and fanfare. The strength Elesin needs to break through the fiery metaphysical thoroughfare is what he dissipates in breaking a hymen (Ogundele 52). All of these, plus his lack of ultimate will, constitute his flaw as a tragic protagonist of Yoruba classical drama.
In Elesin’s hands, the Oyo kingdom is a submerged cultural entity, hanging on the precipice, at the brinks of collapse. It is a community whose cyclical structure has been distorted by an unwilling patriarch. It is Olunde, the returnee son of Elesin, who then kick-starts a redemptive social process. To be sure, Olunde’s self-sacrifice is fruitless or of no consequence in a certain sense. Elesin himself confesses that the ritual was to be done in a particular moment—‘You don’t quite understand it all but you know that tonight is when what ought to be must be brought about…It is not an entire night but a moment of the night, and that moment is past. The moon was my messenger and guide’ (DKH 68). Elesin ‘knows when the narrow gates are open’ and it is precisely at that time that he must lead the king through. Anything short is to expose the spirit of the king to ‘wonder in the void of evil with beings who are enemies of life’ (78). So Olunde’s death is ineffectual because the time is past, the king is already astray but most importantly, his spirit is still too tender to bear the king across the abyss. This is what Olakunle George implies when he argues that ‘in a profound sense, then, the social process that Elesin’s failure signals is one that Olunde self-important suicide cannot arrest by a mere gesture of the will’ (86). Olunde redeems only his personal and family honor, not the village or community. It is only a symbolic gesture to the colonial institution represented by Pilkings that only so much can we change a people, for culture is more powerful than the colonial [political] power. While Olunde’s death might be ineffectual in the context of the play, as a cultural action, it constitutes a significant thematic concern that the play dramatizes. His death signals a collective will of the people, and the tenacity of any repressed culture in the face of an imperial onslaught of a global proportion.
Olunde’s self-immolation comes from his new knowledge of other worlds. If he fled from home believing that his culture was barbaric, his experience outside has proved to him that all cultures, all civilizations—European, American, Asian or African, are actually kept alive by the culture of self-sacrifice—of the individual for the whole. He tells Mrs. Pilkings ‘…I found your people quite admirable in many ways, their conduct and courage in this war for instance’ (55). So the contexts may differ, but the essence is the same. As a medical intern in Britain during World War II, he attended to British soldiers wounded from the battle to save the empire; he witnessed altruistic acts on behalf of nations by leaders (an immediate example being the risk born by the Prince only to erect a British Flag in the colony), and here again Mrs. Pilkings arms him with the story of a captain who blows himself up for the sake of the people living by the shore. In other words, Olunde, as George reads him is ‘presented as having seen the west on its own grounds, complete in its wartime vulnerabilities’ (81). He has thus come to the conclusion that human sacrifice, in whichever guise, is a necessary lubrication to the wheels of social/communal/national life. When he appears in the play, we meet him as a determined young man with a clear cultural vision and project. And his entry is commensurate with his intentions—it is austere, sober. Soyinka himself describes him as ‘a young black man in a sober western suit.’ A medical student from Europe, he deserves a more grandiose entry, but he keeps it low, aware of the enormity of what his community is going through. Olunde then becomes that voice of confrontation with the oppressive colonial institution that has ‘no respect for what it does not understand’ (DKH 55). And because he now knows the secrets of both worlds, he is now fearless. The scene immediately preceding his entry is that in which Amusa returns to the Pilkings at the dance ball in the residency. His drama of silence (he will not talk to the Pilkings in Egungun costume) is because he believes the Egungun masquerade is the spirit of death. While Amusa remains voiceless, dazed by his tradition and a suppressive colonial institution, Olunde is given voice and a confrontational one for that matter. Unlike Amusa, when he meets Jane with the Egungun costume, he is unshaken because, as George argues, for ‘Olunde, intentionality mediates his reaction to Jane dressed as Egungun, and since a white colonial functionary cannot wear the mask for the same reason that the native wears it, he is able to see Jane as Jane. He thus disregards her status at that moment as ‘mask in motion’- which is the spirit of the dead in material incarnation’ (83). The secularization of Olunde’s traditional African consciousness by western contact assumes a positive value here because it ironically becomes an enablement in the confrontational dialectics between him and Jane as a spokesman for autochthonous values. This is what we also encounter with the young schoolgirls who ridicule Amusa in the market place when he goes to arrest Elesin. This, I think, is Soyinka’s own subtle suggestion to the hope for cultural revivalism in Africa—not the worn-out Elesins, the dazed Amusas, but the educated Olundes and the young schoolgirls. It is they that have acquired the new knowledge of the century to redeem Africa from ‘being squelched in the spittle of an alien race.’xi
The Pilkings constitute an interesting pair in the play; a seemingly sympathetic Jane and an obstinate Pilkings, of course both blinded by British colonial sentiments. While Jane clearly has some influence on her husband Simon, her feminist sentiments are secondary to the colonial project. But taken together, we encounter in the Pilkings a prototypical colonial institution and mindset in its entirety. According to Radhamani, ‘colonial administration carried with it repeated instances of political and personal interventions, conversions to Christianity, desecration of ancestral mask, indifference to significance of customs and traditions and above all, a sense of unquestioned superiority of white man over the African’ (43). This is all exemplified in the district officer: first they aid Olunde leave for England against the will of his father; then they desecrate the communal insignia of sacredness (Egungun); and finally they meddle in a communal rite that does not impinge nor undermine British colonial authority in anyway. As representatives of colonial authority, they meddle in and hence toy with both private and public lives. This, of course, comes from the perception that both the personal and the public life of indigenous people are in dire need of help—rescue from an allegedly barbaric and backward culture to a supposedly refined western mode of being. But curiously the Pilkings do not belong here nor there. Mr. Pilking has a knack for spiting sheepish Christian fundamentalism (note his use of ‘holy water nonsense’ which he uses on Joseph) and of course, does not see any value in African culture. Only the colonial project, which subjugates the people, their capital, their culture, matters. Mr. Pilking is therefore an outcome of an industrial and scientific age where ‘ritual has acquired a pejorative connotation of meaningless exercise, a mundane tradition’ (William 67). The Pilkings then represent that typical western mindset contoured by ‘period dialectics’, as Soyinka himself puts it. In the immediate fictional world of the play then, they may be inconsequential, especially in the play’s concern with ‘threnodic essence,’ but in the larger cultural project of the narrative, it is for the likes of the Pilkings that the play was written.
